There are crimes that do not merely wound a victim; they shatter the very possibility of believing that childhood remains a sacred territory. On July 16, the Fiscalía General de Justicia de Zacatecas secured the indictment of a 13-year-old adolescent for the crimes of attempted feminicide and aggravated equivalent rape against Arely, a girl of only 10 years from the municipality of Tabasco. The minor intercepted her as she left school, sexually assaulted her, and threw her from a bridge. She was left in critical condition. And, as if the horror were not enough, the perpetrator was indicted without pretrial detention, a decision that sparked protests.
This is not a “particular tragedy.” It is the most brutal symptom of a formative void that has been gestating for years in plain sight. When digital media occupy the place once held by the family, the school, and the institutions that shape values, what is produced is not freedom, but a profound mutation in the way minors understand the body, desire, and power within an immature personality.
Hypersexualization is no longer a marginal phenomenon. It is the everyday landscape of screens that children and adolescents consume without adult mediation. In that environment, sexuality becomes a visual commodity, entertainment content, an object of immediate consumption. The body of another ceases to be inviolable and becomes a readily available resource. Violence, far from generating rejection, is normalized as language, as a way of asserting dominance, as spectacle. A 13-year-old adolescent is not born knowing how to rape and throw a girl from a bridge. He learns, absorbs, imitates. And what he is absorbing is a culture that has emptied respect, dignity, and boundaries of meaning.
The objectification of sexuality is not a side effect of technology: it is its very logic when left without ethical counterbalance. On social networks, in algorithms that prioritize the most extreme content, in pornography accessible at increasingly younger ages, the other is reduced to a stimulus. Consent dissolves. Empathy atrophies. And when that logic penetrates minds that have not yet consolidated their capacity for moral judgment, the result can be exactly what happened in Tabasco, Zacatecas: a minor treating another minor as a disposable object.
Here appears in all its rawness the culture of death denounced by Pope Benedict XVI and the throwaway culture repeatedly highlighted by Pope Francis. Minors have become merchandise. Not only in the economic sense of trafficking or exploitation, but in a deeper and more perverse sense: they are raw material for a system that trains them for indifference, for violence as the ultimate form of relationship, for a life project in which the other is always instrumental. They are educated—or rather, miseducated—in a vacuum of meaning where human dignity is no longer a starting point but an obstacle.
The future darkens not because laws are lacking or because institutions fail in specific cases. It darkens because we are producing generations of human beings who have been denied the opportunity to learn that another person’s body is sacred, that violence is not destiny, and that sexuality is not consumption. When a 13-year-old child can do what was done to Arely, and when an entire society seems incapable of reacting beyond momentary outrage, what is at stake is not only the safety of girls, but the very possibility of building human coexistence.
It is not enough to toughen penalties. It is not enough to have “prevention” programs that remain mere rhetoric. What is required is to urgently and unapologetically reclaim spaces of real formation, the home where respect is taught before absolute autonomy, the school that does not surrender to the logic of entertainment, the communities that still uphold non-negotiable values. As long as digital media continue to occupy the place of educators and parents or guardians, and as long as hypersexualization and violence are consumed as entertainment, we will continue sowing what we later reap with horror.
Arely survives, wounded in body and soul. The 13-year-old adolescent faces legal proceedings. But the question we cannot evade is more serious: how many more are we shaping so that discard and violence become their only possible language?